Has The Pirate Bay moved to North Korea? Probably not

Bit early for an April Fool's isn't it?

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The Pirate Bay: setting sail for interesting new waters

The Pirate Bay says that the Republic of Korea has invited it to use North Korean networks to run its controversial file-sharing service.

If you think that sounds like a joke, you're not alone. Unfortunately, no one from North Korea nor The Pirate Bay was immediately available to verify or refute the story so all we have to go on is TPB's blog post.

The Prankster Bay

Posted by the suspiciously-named Kim Jung-Bay (probably a fan of looking at things like the dearly departed Kim Jong-Il and the illustrious leader Kim Jong-Un), TPB's blog post on the matter explains:

"The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world," alluding to the fact that the Swedish Pirate Party recently shut down its routing service to the Pirate Bay under legal threats.

"A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalongya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand.

"Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network."

Heaping on the understatement, the post describes the set-up as "truly an ironic situation", given North Korea's famously close-minded politics and closed-down digital and physical borders.

Pants on fire

Although we're having a tough time officially verifying this story, Torrent Freak says a TPB insider told them that it's for real.

"We've been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country," the source told Torrent Freak.

"TPB has been invited just like Eric Schmidt and Dennis Rodman. We've declined up until now."

It's true that North Korea has allowed outside use of its 3G network in the last week, just as it's true that Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been over to schmooze the North Korean big wigs.

What's more, Torrent Freak verified that TPB is currently being routed through a North Korean net block at the moment.

That's not the end of it though; one hacker says it is categorically a fake.

Known only as Will, he claims that TPB did some 'routing magic' to make it appear that it was serving from North Korea, while actually just using some dummy IP addresses to set up a fake Border Gateway Protocol (BGP); he concludes that the server is actually hosted in Germany.

Update: And the word from the UK's Pirate Party is: "Everything points to this being a rather colourful hoax."

Just as we suspected then - but party leader Loz Kaye added, "As ever we are keeping an eye on events."